The View from Below

...Taking the first alternative, Lyndon Johnson defined his role (with reasonable plausibility, until he sank into the Vietnam swamp) as that of unifier and healer...

...When Nixon asserted a choice between Great Society and Pentagon appropriations, these voters deserted McGovem in droves...

...as befits the Nixon era, Lubell's interpretation of contemporary political history is gloomy...

...In short, the President triumphed because he persuaded the Silent Majority to accept his narrow definition of its self-interest...

...Thus, sweeping to his 1964 landslide, LBJ seemed to have realized the politician's dream of giving a little something to every identifiable group and interest...

...Even though the evident haste of the writing diminishes at a crucial point the force of its arguments, the revelations of Lubell's intensive interviews with average voters deserve serious attention...

...Though I am fully prepared to believe almost anything bad about this despicable administration, I cannot in all honesty say Lubell has really demonstrated that single-minded pursuit of reelection is a Nixon invention...

...The opposite strategy of division separates the electorate into good people and bad people, patriots and cowards, whites and blacks, and, naturally, winners and losers...

...He was mindful that his political hero, Franklin Roosevelt, had twice achieved similar triumphs in unifying his countrymen, first against the domestic disaster of the Depression, then against the foreign menace of Fascism...

...as creep presented them, they included choices between Daniel Ellsberg and the heroic POWs, veterans and draft dodgers, funds for national defense and gifts to adherents of the welfare ethic, and the preservation of neighborhood schools and "social experiments" involving the busing of tender youngsters vast distances to inferior schools populated with violent blacks...

...Granted, Nixon may have made more deliberate and systematic political use of Presidential leverage than Roosevelt did in winning a third term or Johnson in extracting from Congress the Gulf of Tonkin resolution while simultaneously running as the peace candidate of the electoral year...

...The frightening aspect of Lubell's report derives from his finding that a majority of the voters accepted the election on these terms...

...Successful practitioners take pains always to define "their" voters as the good, patriotic winners...

...In his view, presidents choose between the two governing strategies of unification and division...

...On the evidence of Lubell's inquiries, such alterations of contemporary practices, admirable as they may be, are highly unlikely...

...Certainly the daily Watergate revelations strongly imply that in the Nixon White House the Bill of Rights meant rather less than creep's campaign bills...

...apparently, the Nixon version of events was particularly appealing on the gut questions of jobs and wages...

...as the Second Inaugural memorably phrased the sentiment, "In our own lives, let each of us ask not just what will government do for me, but what can I do for myself...

...Reviewed by Robert Lekachman This brief book, fleshed out with an appendix that consists of a 1971 speech explaining and defending Samuel Lubell's polling methodology, reads like the prospectus for a major study of the 1972 election...

...In Lubell's words, "The 1972 campaign posed one truly agonizing political question-Can a military-industrial job complex that spends $80 billion a year and provides 6 million jobs be voted out of office...

...One might observe that in 1968 the answer was affirmative...

...and, for the university crowd, a gratifying expansion of employment in teaching, health administration, social work, antipoverty activity...

...new business opportunities for corporate giants in educational technology, job training and nursing homes...

...He added the possibly indispensable reassurance that in pursuing selfish interests and neglecting weaker members of the community Nixon voters were behaving admirably...

...Here he argues that White House manipulation of the economy, Pentagon appropriations, the Vietnam war, taxes, and the Federal budget was totally and unprecedentedly addressed to the single objective of winning an election...

...all things to all men, the Great Society promised succor to the poor, black and urban...

...Lubell is rather less successful in establishing the even more important proposition that Nixon's "total" politics are something unique in the american experience...

...No student of Richard Nixon's political career -from the early campaigns against Jerry Voorhis and Helen Gahagan Douglas, through the alger Hiss case and Dean acheson's College of Cowardly Communist Containment, to the great kitchen debate with Nikita Khrushchev (arranged by William Safire)-was startled for an instant by their man's preference, once he became President, for arousing group jealousies, rubbing sore the wounds of ancient animosities, manipulating events and opinion, and appealing at every turn to the darker side of human nature...

...Blue-collar families seemed to agree with John Connally that only wars or a huge peacetime military establishment guaranteed full employment...

...In the 1972 campaign, the morality drama cast by the White House (whose agents frequently paid salaries to the "villains") featured hard-working adherents of God, flag, conventional morality, and professional sports against George McGovern's rabble of pot-smoking, free-living, non-working hippies, lazy welfare mothers, bomb-throwing radicals (after instruction by the FBI), and Eastern elitists...

...presumably the events of that year were somewhat special...

...The issues...

...substantial tax benefits for the affluent...

...Lubell concludes The Future as It Happened with exhortations to the country to return to first constitutional principles: "Yield power only in small doses" to the President, and "bring all power under law...